Pictured third from left is lead author Aman Arora along with FCCM conference officials.
Professors Lizy John and Jaydeep Kulkarni, along with PhD students Aman Arora, Tanmay Anand, Aatman Borda, Rishabh Sehgal, and Bagus Hanindhito, received the Best Paper Award at the 2022 IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM) for their paper "CoMeFa: Compute-in-Memory Blocks for FPGAs."
FCCM is "the original and premier forum for presenting and discussing new research related to computing that exploits the unique features and capabilities of FPGAs and other reconfigurable hardware."
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are semiconductor devices that are based around a matrix of configurable logic blocks (LBs) connected via programmable interconnects. FPGAs can be reprogrammed to desired application or functionality requirements after manufacturing. They are being used to accelerate workloads ranging from internet search, to baseband processing, to the ubiquitous Deep Learning (DL). Block RAMs (BRAMs) are the storage houses of FPGAs, providing extensive on-chip memory bandwidth to the compute units implemented using Logic Blocks (LBs) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) slices.The paper proposes modifying BRAMs to convert them to CoMeFa (Compute-In-Memory Blocks for FPGAs) RAMs. A CoMeFa RAM block enables precision-agnostic dynamically-configurable computation within the RAM array, without transferring the data in or out of it. This in turn increases the compute throughput of the FPGA speeding up many workloads while improving the energy efficiency as well, at a very low overhead/cost.
Aman Arora is a PhD student in Texas ECE supervised by Prof. John in the Laboratory of Computer Architecture (LCA).
Tanmay Anand was a visiting student intern at LCA and is an incoming graduate student (Fall '22) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Aatman Borda was a visiting student intern at LCA and is now a Design Verification Engineer at NVIDIA.
Rishabh Sehgal is a PhD student in Texas ECE supervised by Prof. Kulkarni in the Circuit Research Lab (CRL).
Bagus Hanindhito is a PhD student in Texas ECE supervised by Prof. John in the Laboratory of Computer Architecture.
Jaydeep Kulkarni is an assistant professor and holds the Fellow of Silicon Laboratories Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering and Fellow of AMD Chair in Computer Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He has filed 35 patents, published 2 book chapters, and over 100 papers in referred journals and conferences. He is a senior member of IEEE and currently serving as the chair of IEEE solid state circuits society and circuits and systems society central Texas joint chapter.
Lizy Kurian John holds the Cullen Trust for Higher Education Endowed Professorship in Engineering #3 in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. John was named a Fellow of IEEE in 2009, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2020, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2020.
